girlies yall need to start playing tower unite... if u ever played PS HOME or various other 2005 - 2013 online social game from that era u gotta try it NOW.
gonna do something a bit different for this post! I made my first real/finished/functional model in Blender early in 2025 so I thought it would be fun to make a longer post going over it in detail!
this is what a the finished product looks like! this is gonna be a long post so I'll break it up with a read more ^^
so this wasn't my 100% first foray into modeling but this was my first really committed attempt to make something that is functional and serves as a good reference for me to use when drawing Dax!
January 3rd 2025 is the first version I ended up saving a render of, it looked like this at the time:
A good start but I lot more to work through to get it looking better!
By January 9th I had the cloak in, the face better proportioned, and the hair much more figured out! I was having a hard time making sense of how to translate their hair into 3D and got a fun idea to have their hair tied up into a hairstick, so I designed that and threw it on the model! Initially I used the sprite as a placeholder but I liked the look of the model having some 2D sprites on it (which I would use even more later!)
by this point I was basically spending all my waking hours working on this so I had more renders from the next day with incremental changes:
One of my biggest goals was to make a model that worked so that I could put Dax in Gmod! So I got to work on porting the model. I was able to get it vaguely working in the game on around the 13th of January after many many hours of mental anguish that happens when you have no programming experience and decide to try modding games because. it's fun. I think
eventually I had some kind mutuals on twitter give me some advice and that's how I learned what smooth shading is lol. This got it looking much better but I was still very much in the mindset that I would need to keep working on this for a while. By this point I was starting to mess with the more technical parts of Gmod playermodels like jigglebones and I think trying to get the cloak working cost me a small piece of my sanity permanently OTL
By this point I felt like I had gotten it good enough to finish and upload since I could feel that I was running out of steam and needed to take a break after ~2 weeks of me spending basically every available moment I had working on this! so I uploaded it to the workshop for the first time on January 17th :]
I took a good long break from modeling for a while. I did mess with it occasionally but I didn't revisit it too much until my friends (assholes!! playfully) knew they could get me to start playing tower unite if they could convince me to port Dax into that game as well. but I knew I wanted to fix some things about the model so I went ahead and started on that first around July 20th when I made this render.
also if you're wondering. Learning to model is easy. Learning to UV map is annoying but doable. Learning to weight paint is a cruel Sisyphean punishment that the universe inflicts on people trying to learn Blender
by now I was unhappy with the textures so I gave those a new pass to make them look crunchy and low res. I also did not like the way the bell looked to I decided to make that a sprite too! also the cloak got basically reworked entirely because I it sucked to work with and I needed it to work better. basically spent another (less intensive) week working on it from the 20th to the 27th to get it updated and ported into tower unite (which is easier to do than Gmod but you get less features to play with and a lot less documentation on how to fix problems you run into). I also figured out how to give them a cool looking outline!
of course since I changed the model, I knew that I would want to update it in Gmod as well OTL so I got to work on that about a month later!
Before I uploaded the 2.0 version to Gmod I gave them some more toggles for clothing for fun too!
and that basically brings us to then end! I ended up working on it here and there over the next few months to try and make it work a little bit better in a few places. But yeah! Idk if any of this is particularly interesting to anyone but I wanted to find a way to upload my process modeling Dax last year without it being all over the place and disorganized. Thanks for reading if you did!
